Posts Tagged ‘Safari’

Today marks the release of the long-awaited Firefox 3. By all reports, an good browser with great features - and when the site is back up and running, I’ll probably download it myself.

But despite the increased adoption of alternate browsers such as Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc., Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser, and will continue to be the most-used browser for the foreseeable future.

Many will disagree - however, let me explain why I believe this:

The problem is not on the user end. There are many thousands of alternate browser users who are enthusiastically spreading the word. Personally, I recommend Firefox to just about everyone - and most have tried it, and prefer it to IE. No - there is definitely no problem getting users to switch away from IE.

This is something I simply don’t understand. But it appears that there are many developers out there who are unaware of either the existence of browsers other than IE, or just don’t care to learn how to make their sites work on other browsers.

But the problem doesn’t stop with the developers. The real problem lies with the management of the companies who hire these developers. They hire people who work only with IE, because they are not aware, or don’t care, that there are other browsers.

Now, I can’t imagine why any company would knowingly neglect over 20% of its potential customer base, so the only conclusion I can reach is that this failure is due to ignorance. The people running these companies either don’t know about alternate browsers, don’t know the number of people using alternate browsers, or don’t know that different browsers require different coding.